Without much fuss, ASUS slipped out a revision of its Radeon HD 7950 DirectCU II graphics card. The revision breaks away from the common board design between the HD 7950 and HD 7970 DirectCU II models, and uses newer, compact PCB and cooler. The revision could ready ASUS for future price cuts of the GPU.

Without much fuss, ASUS slipped out a revision of its Radeon HD 7950 DirectCU II graphics card. The revision breaks away from the common board design between the HD 7950 and HD 7970 DirectCU II models, and uses newer, compact PCB and cooler. The revision could ready ASUS for future price cuts of the GPU.

The new board design will be applied to both the standard and TOP variants. Its most notable feature is the reduced length, which appears to be down by an inch, if not more. It's unclear if there are any casualties of this design change. The cooler appears to be just a compacted version of the original, that looks a little less rough on the edges. According to one source, the new cooler features denser aluminum fin stacks, and uses six heat pipes to transport heat, instead of five on the original design. A secondary heatsink runs the entire length of the obverse side of the PCB, drawing heat from memory, MOSFETs, and other hot ancillary components, and cools them under the air-flow of the main heatsink.

The display output configuration is also changed, with the revision featuring two dual-link DVI apart from one-each of HDMI 1.4a and standard-size DisplayPort 1.2; in comparison to the original featuring two mini-DisplayPorts, and just one dual-link DVI. Apart from the design changes mentioned, both the base and TOP models of the new HD 7950 DirectCU II graphics cards retain the clock speeds of the originals. The base model ships with 800 MHz core, 5.00 GHz (effective) memory; while the TOP model ships with 900 MHz core and 5.00 GHz (effective) memory.

The revised ASUS HD 7950 DirectCU II graphics cards will initially sell at the same prices as those of the originals, although it's expected that the revisions will give ASUS a better cushion against falling prices. Based on the 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon, the Radeon HD 7950 from AMD features 1,792 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs, a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface holding 3 GB of memory, and support for the DirectX 11.1 API.